Clint Bowyer and Kasey Kahne saw their hopes of winning the Sprint Cup championship all but disappear Sunday at Texas Motor Speedway.

Kahne, who started the race 29 points behind Jimmie Johnson, cut a tire after making contact with teammate Jeff Gordon late in the race. He finished 25th and dropped to 58 points behind Johnson with two races remaining.

Bowyer had a solid day with a sixth-place finish, but thanks to Johnson’s victory is now 36 points behind.

“I’ve said this all along, it’s fun to be racing for the championship, but I’m more proud of where we’re at contending for that championship, winning three races our first year together as a group,” said Bowyer, who joined Michael Waltrip Racing this year. “We’ve got a long time to work. We just keep polishing the edges and keep getting better fixing our program week-in and week-out. We’ll be there.”

Bowyer thought he had a chance when Johnson and Brad Keselowski were slamming into each other and racing door-to-door.

“It’s just unbelievable,” Bowyer said. “You keep having these top-10 runs and flirting with the top fives week-in and week-out, and unless you’re winning these races every week you just can’t gain points.

“Even if we were winning right now, it ain’t enough to run them down for a championship. We’re having fun. We’re just taking it week by week. I thought they were going to wreck each other, but they didn’t. It would have been awesome.”

Busch brothers have good weekend

Kyle Busch earned a third-place finish at Texas and his brother Kurt finished eighth for just his third top-10 of the season.

For Kyle, he is enjoying his best performance during the Chase—even though he’s not in it. He missed the Chase for just the second time in the past seven years after a series of mishaps and mechanical problems during the summer.

“You’ve got to continue to work hard and strive to get better,” Kyle Busch said. “For missing the Chase by what we did, yeah, we had a lot of technical problems, but I’m sure there were a few races where we could have finished better.

“So, we’ve got to get better in every opportunity that we can. This last 10 weeks have been pretty good. We’ve run well. We’ve been fast. We’ve shown speed.”

Busch had three solid races at Texas, proving to himself that he should continue to run as many Truck Series and Nationwide races as possible. He qualified in the top three in all three events and had solid runs with a fourth in the trucks, third in Nationwide and third in Cup. He had cut back his truck and Nationwide schedules this year after running dozens of races in all three series in the past several years.

“At the beginning of the year it was told to me that I should cut back on my extracurricular racing because it distracts me from my Cup effort,” Busch said. “Then I come out and qualify in the top-three in all three series.

“If it wasn’t for a truck battery issue that we had, we would have finished top-three in all three series. Any sort of track time that I can get, it always seems to be beneficial for me no matter how tired I feel on Monday. This is a good race weekend for us.”

It was a year ago when Busch was suspended for the Nationwide and Cup races at Texas after intentionally wrecking Ron Hornaday in the truck race.

“It’s funny what a year makes,” Busch said. “It’s disappointing that we couldn’t come out of here with a win.

“I’ve just been so close so many times here that you wish you could have an opportunity to make something happen in the last few restarts and get somewhere, but we just haven’t been able to figure that out.”

For Kurt, it was his best finish on an oval all year in just his fourth race with Furniture Row Racing.

“Considering that we had a top-five or top-10 car at the last two races but got nailed in accidents, it was important to come away with a solid finish today,” Kurt Busch said. “We've made a lot of progress as a team in a short period of time, which gives us plenty of optimism for 2013.

“However, we still have some handling issues to work out, but we're getting there. I am really proud of how we came back today after struggling for a good portion of the race."

Stewart pleased with comeback

Tony Stewart struggled at the start of the race and was even passed by rookie teammate Danica Patrick at one point.

But he came back to finish fifth thanks to some great pit stops and his team working on his car throughout the race.

“What an awesome, awesome comeback,” Stewart said. “The setup that we ended up running in the race, we had six laps on at the end of (final practice) yesterday.

“I’m just so proud of everybody on the pit crew on the pit stops. The last two stops got us a lot of track position and really proud of (crew chief) Steve Addington, he just kept digging away at it and kept tweaking on it making it better and better all day.”